Team Game for Intelligent Agents

Software	An object oriented language, preferably Smalltalk
Covers	Architectures for multi-agent systems, heuristic reasoning
Skills Required	Programming, interest in artificial intelligence
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ??? Programming ?????

Brief Description

Team games of all sorts require challenging tactical thinking: players need to act in ways that help team-mates and hinder opponents. To do this, players can either try to anticipate the actions of both opponents and team-mates in deciding what to do next, or simply apply general tactical principles that usually produce desirable results. The challenge of this project is to devise a computer game that can be played by two teams of autonomous agents, build an agent based architecture for the game with a graphic display, into which teams of autonomous agents can be loaded and run, implement an architecture for individual agents that can be used to program different rulesets to govern their behaviour, and implement a few simple agents to play the game. You may choose to concentrate on developing a high quality game architecture with a good interface, or on developing smart tactical agents within a relatively simple architecture. Clean system design allowing easy modular modification of different aspects of the game will be essential. (I would like a clean game architecture that others can reuse, for example to develop more sophisticated tactical agents.)

The type of game I anticipate is something like a simple ball game like netball (or disc game like Ultimate) in which agents move around a playing area (that is a rectangular or perhaps toroid grid, with or without diagonal lines) passing a 'ball' between themselves or into the goal. The trick will be to devise a set of rules that make scoring possible but not too easy, and that require the attacking team to risk losing possession in order to make progress. (The game architecture should allow the the user to modify the rules governing the playing area, number of players, what risks are involved in passing, and so on, so that the game design can be perfected by experiment.)

The psychotic might prefer a battle game or a hunting game. You may prefer to devise a completely different sort of team game - but keep it simple!

Extension

You might implement the agents as programs running in separate threads – a nice twist and good experience but not necessary for a satisfactory multi-agent system.

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